Categories
Roleplaying

LEDheads

So last time we played a superheroes game, it was suggested that the PCs protect their secret IDs by wearing hoodies and hooking up LEDs near their faces, because (I claimed) this will blind phone cameras.

Turns out this is an actual product, and it really doesn’t look very impressive/effective.

Categories
Roleplaying

Aleister Crowley and the curse of Tutankhamun

A Victorian Campaign premise from The Telegraph:

Six mysterious London deaths famously attributed to the ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’ were actually murders by notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley, a historian claims in a new book.

Crowley wrote in his diaries that he believed the locations of five of the Ripper’s murders in Whitechapel in 1888 formed a pentagram – an important star-shaped symbol in Satanism.

Mr Beynon claims that the locations of five of Crowley’s ‘murders’ form a copycat pentagram.

I’m sorry, wasn’t this the plot of a recent movie?

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Roleplaying

D&D Linkery

Ask Chris – what 5 superheroes would you play D&D with?

Which brings me to my first point: Much as it might surprise you, there is no way in hell I would play D&D with Batman.

every pre-fabbed dungeon ever – a blueprint for nearly every D&D game you read/wrote/played/ran.

2. You kill some monsters. They don’t have anything cool to steal, but the players go as far as disrobing the dead for the couple coppers the boots will re-sell for. A secret door leads to room 5, which doesn’t really matter since the players will definitely backtrack to make sure they get the xp and gp in room 3.

Categories
Blather Roleplaying

Mad Men By Alignment

Via Jess Nevins:

The number of people who are fans of both D&D and Mad Men is small – but all four of us think this is brilliant.

The Dungeons and Dragons Alignments of Mad Men characters
Updated: Apparently the source for this is MightyGodKing, who also did a bunch more of those, for shows I’m not interested in and for The Wire and 30 Rock.

Categories
Comics Roleplaying

Cosmic Nerdcore

I know of Eugene Ahn thanks to his podcast War Rocket Ajax, which he hosts alongside Chris Sims. Two weeks ago I bought his debut album, The War For infinity. Although all the tracks are available streaming online, the thing is a concept album, and it requires the uninterrupted listening I get when walking with an mp3 player, not when sitting in front of the distraction box that is a computer.

Concept album? Well, essentially this is a 21st century hip-hop retelling of the Infinity Gauntlet, the 1990s Marvel comics mini-series where, as far as I can tell, Jim Starlin retold once more the story of a big battle for the fate of the universe between his doomed messiah figure, Adam Warlock, and his Darkseid-ripoff evil god figure, Thanos the lover (literally!) of Death personified. And the awesome thing about Ege’s album is how the modern nerdcore hip-hop delivery manages to convey Jim Starlin’s 70s-era Cosmic themes, which always held a distinct dark seam beneath the space opera superhero bombast (Starlin wrote The Death of Captain Marvel, a graphic novel where one of the characters most closely associated with him dies from cancer).

The deluxe version of The War For infinity includes a whole extra album of material by Euge mixed by DJ Empirical, and while it’s also quite enjoyable (I really like the mix of Smash Gordon, available in a different version on Euge’s blog), it mostly served to highlight the importance of Euge’s two collaborators,  producer Ruckus Roboticus and guest MC Tribe One in the role of Demonus (the album’s version of Thanos; sounds dumb but grows on you) to the success of the debut.

But as a listener to War Rocket Ajax, I already know that Euge can pick ’em.